On War Writing: A Roundtable Discussion

Gathered here around a virtual table is an eclectic assembly of thinkers who offer their responses to a series of questions and issues connected to the literature of war.

don a: Donald Anderson / doug a: Doug Anderson / mg: Matt Gallagher / sh: Sam Hamill / pm: Peter Molin / mn: Marilyn Nelson / sp: Stacey Peebles

Can war writing bridge the gulf between the experience of war and those who’ve never experienced it firsthand, and if so, in what ways?

SH:

A great writer presents an experience that is a cosmology unto itself. We may draw deeply from firsthand experience, but we can’t replicate it. Good writing is an act of revelation to its author even when the subject is clearly predetermined. What is “good war writing” depends on any given reader’s angle of perception. An antiwar activist and an army major read a biography of Napoleon and come to entirely different conclusions despite reading the same words in the same order.

DON A:

What is remembered or imagined becomes reality. And if we don’t create our personal versions of the past, someone else will do it for us. This is a frightening and political fact. How many books, for instance, seek to refute the fact of the Holocaust, complete with footnotes, et al.? And who can forget the opening pages of Milan Kundera’s novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which describe a photograph from which a party official has been airbrushed from history? Then there is Cynthia Ozick’s short story “The Shawl,” a strafing account of a death camp murder of a stick-limbed child. Though born in time to have been interned in a death camp, Cynthia Ozick wasn’t; she was, at the story’s fictional time, a cheerleader in high school in New Jersey. Memory and imagination are the what and how we have as artists and readers and citizens. To which we must cling, as if to luck or safety.

MG:

No, but not because of any failures of the writer. Because there are inherent limitations to language, and so much of war defies those limitations.

MN:

While one can never truly experience the experience of another, storytellers have mesmerized audiences with stories of heroes and their adventures ever since extended families gathered around the very first campfires. War writing continues that gift of story, allowing readers in this and subsequent generations to imagine that most painful, most trying, terrifying, testing experience through words.

PM:

War writing is to a large degree reportage, and many aspects of modern war are new(s) to readers who haven’t deployed. For example, life on a fob, getting hit by ieds, nation and host nation army building, and relationships maintained and defined by Skype, texting, and Facebook are all elements that just wait careful and interesting description. In terms of deeper issues, such as death, loss, pain, guilt, and killing, veterans just need to keep trying as hard as they can to describe these things honestly and interestingly without falling into the traps of cliché, self-aggrandizement, boasting, glorification, exaggeration, melodrama, and so forth. It’s a challenge that not every vet writer will surmount every time.

DOUG A:

I believe it can provide an immediacy of experience that reveals the particular of an experience, beyond all the generalizations about war. How we eat, shit, sleep, and pack our gear. How intense being under fire and yet how dull the day to day, the waiting. Our culture in particular needs direct experience beyond the packaged versions they’ve been fed. We’ve not had a war in this country in living memory. The decisions people make with their votes, for or against a war, cost or save lives. It is important for them to know viscerally what war is about. War writing can do this, with a chance detail, a fragment of dialogue, an image.

SP:

The gap between a soldier on the front lines and the civilian back home is a big one...